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Chapter L
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.
Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they
have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are
strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have
known from childhood or the populous streets in which they
have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend
their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof
among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is
this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the
search for something permanent, to which they may attach
themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the
wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim
beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to
which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home
he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never
seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were
familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
I told Tiare the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas's
Hospital.
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